It’s great to hear from so many of you thinking about entering our student Minecraft competition.

We’re received a few enquiries about the best ways to access the program.

You can purchase an individual Minecraft account licence. The cost is $40.

However, recognising the appeal and value of the program to education, Microsoft has created ‘Minecraft Education Edition’, which offers a special and much cheaper licence for schools to use (the cost is the equivalent of US$5 per licence per year).

For information, go to https://education.minecraft.net  Hopefully this has the answers you need about purchasing and downloading – hit ‘Get Started’ and it should take you through the process. However, if you have any problems, let us know. We’ll help if I can … or point you in the direction of someone who can.

Taking videos of your Minecraft creation

Some of you have also asked about recording a video of what you create in Minecraft. Although it’s possible to create screenshot within the program, it’s not possible to do videos  from within it – so you have to do it with an external recorder.

There are two main ways to do this:

• Simply use a video camera to record what appears on the screen. You’re essentially taking  video of your computer. It gets you the end result but be careful with controlling the conditions – things like glare from the screen or the sound quality.
• Alternatively, there are a number of recorder programs that capture what’s displayed on your screen – but this is ‘internal’, so what you’re seeing is being recorded. Here are a couple of apps you could try. They’re free and you need to download them:
  • OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) – https://obsproject.com
  • Flashback Express – https://www.flashbackrecorder.com/express/
  • CamStudio – https://camstudio.org
  • Screencast – https://screencast-o-matic.com/screen-recorder

If you want to narrate the video, you’ll need a microphone.

Once you have your video footage, if you’re happy with it, just send it to us. Alternatively, you can edit it, so you only give us what you want (and you can add text/audio, etc.) For this you use something like iMovie or MovieMaker or your video editor of choice.

The INTERFACE Team